Since we don't imagine Switchzilla has started giving away the version of IOS running in its ASA firewalls, Vulture South suspects it arises from a popular open source library. Which means other vulnerable devices could be out there.

In the normal course of events, a host would receive that packet in response to a message it had initiated – but of course, it's trivial to craft that packet and send it to a target.

In devices susceptible to BlackNurse, the operating system gets indigestion trying to process even a relatively low rate of these messages – in the original report from Denmark's TF-CSIRT, gigabit-capable routers could be borked by just 18 Mbps of BlackNurse traffic on their WAN interfaces.

Re:FFS, I ran across this 25 years agoRe:FFS, I ran across this 25 years ago(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday November 15 2016, @02:28PM

hmm 23 years ago would cut it close to Windows 95's use (being released Aug 24th in 1995 I believe); Novell was still king of network protocols in the Windows 3.11 era. What did you know of in the TCP/IP stack at the time that would have effectively patched what was academic protocol in most enterprise environments, provided they were using Ethernet and not 802.5 or a similar topology with IPX as the layer 3 method of communication?

Or perhaps that is too granular and I need coffee and snotnose is discussing the ping of death or a related malady?

Large ICMP packets are still useful for testing bandwidth and troublesome links; that power was mostly taken away from the plebs though... unless you have an old OS, network hardware has to be used to send "extended" ICMP traffic where the size or content can be adjusted as needed. Still causes trouble when done wrong or ineptly, though!

This problem is more about the abuse of a regular feature that can tie up old harwdare and essentially crash them, like most typical hardware for firewalls released between 2006 and 2012 or so -- pentium 4 era up to right before the multicore era in network edge hardware. (I guess the ping of death was the abuse of a regular feature, too)

That said, Snotnose, you should come out at night and fight for the forces of good in proactively protecting against this stuff via the release of small free applications posted to various places that count, so people that also are aware of it can help protect against it. (of course, it is hard to run an application on edge network hardware directly to protect against something like this--the app presumably would protect a computer/server host as opposed to a network appliance.)

Re:FFS, I ran across this 25 years ago(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:49AM

My bad, it was more like 15 years ago. The key should have been "before 802.11g', my startup's entire being was based on our protocol being established first.

To be clear, I did not think of this myself. Probably heard about it on /., given the era and the websites I read at the time. But once I heard about it it was pretty easy to defend against it.

My startup's chip sucked up too much power, they went bankrupt before they could do another chip spin, and their early investor (Samsung) bought them for pennies on the dollar.

Ever see that commercial about taking your TV from the living room, to the bedroom, to the pool? That was my startup's technology. It worked, it just took too much power and the company ran out of money before they could fix that.

Actually, being honest, that company was a rats nest. They had a habit of laying off people who were about to vest some stock options. That happened to the guy who got me the first interview there. That got one of the guys who interviewed me, he'd been there 3 years (one of the first employees), was one of the most knowledgeable folks I could talk to when I had a question. They used to have mandatory Friday 5 PM company meetings, where the inner sanctum would wander the crowd and note who was and was not there.

Magis Networks, you sucked a huge bag of dicks and everyone who lost money in you I can only say HA HA.

/ Ahh, alcohol. Is there anything you can't do// name names, Magis was the worst place I ever worked/// Good people, great tech, seriously fucked up upper management